Long Road to Boston. Mr Mark Sutcliffe

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      With less than a mile to go, Beardsley’s hamstring suffered and Salazar surged ahead. But somehow Beardsley managed to pour it on in the final few hundred yards and closed some of the gap. Both runners beat the previous course record, with Salazar winning by two seconds. Salazar was rushed to hospital and given six liters of fluid; despite temperatures in the seventies, he’d had barely anything to drink during the race.

      The marathon was declared the greatest in Boston history; there were two winners that day, many observers proclaimed. Many thought it would be the start of a rivalry but the race took its toll on both athletes and neither matched that performance in the future. Salazar’s decline was gradual. He won other races, including his third straight New York City Marathon that fall. But he noticed it took longer to recover from workouts and that he was always getting sick. This was no ordinary fall; Salazar was still only in his mid-twenties. A few years later, Beardsley suffered a horrifying accident on his farm. During his treatment he became addicted to painkillers. Now sober, he speaks as often to addicts as he does to runners.

      In 1983, Joan Benoit won her second Boston Marathon. The day before the race, Norway’s Grete Waitz broke Benoit’s world record in winning the London Marathon. Benoit reclaimed the record, beating Waitz’s time by more than two-and-a-half minutes. The two met the following year in the first-ever Olympic women’s marathon. Once again, Benoit prevailed, by a minute, over Waitz.

      The Boston Marathon has always had an international flavor. From 1946 to 1954, there were winners representing seven different countries. But until 1988, no one from Africa had ever won the race. When Ibrahim Hussein of Kenya won his first of three Boston championships that year, it touched off a remarkable period of dominance for runners from the Great Rift Valley. In the twenty- nine editions from 1988 through 2016, twenty-six of the men’s winners have come from either Kenya or Ethiopia.

      One of them, Kenya’s Geoffrey Mutai, ran the fastest marathon ever in 2011, finishing in 2:03:02. It didn’t count as a world record because Boston is a point-to-point course with a net loss in elevation. But it was a remarkable performance on what is often described as a tough course.

      African women began their supremacy in Boston in 1997, when Fatuma Roba of Ethiopia won her first of three in a row. After that, Catherine Ndereba of Kenya won four times in five years. From 1997 through 2016, only two runners from Russia interrupted the streak.

      Born in 1975 in Eritrea, Meb Keflezighi and his family were refugees who arrived in the United States when he was twelve years old. Keflezighi became a high school and university middle-distance champion. He won a silver medal in the 2004 Olympic marathon, the first American to win a medal since 1976. He won the New York City Marathon in 2009, the first American champion since 1982.

      And on April 21, 2014, Meb Keflezighi not only won a race but captured the damaged hearts of thousands of runners and spectators.